Mr/Mme Chair,
I have the honour to speak on behalf of the European Union. The Candidate Countries Turkey, Croatia* and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia* , the Countries of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidates Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and the EFTA country Norway, member of the European Economic Area, and Switzerland, as well as Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and Armenia align themselves with this declaration.
As an initial comment to GB document 306/3/1 we would like to express our appreciation of the clear presentation of the ILO strategy to give effect to the Global Jobs Pact. However, future documents would benefit from a more hands-on approach, where the relationship between Office support and the outcomes and results at country-level are specified.
The global economic crisis has been the dominant theme of this Governing Body and rightly so. The discussions in the various committees demonstrate support for stronger ILO impact on the formulation as well as on the implementation of crisis responses.
Since the adoption of the Global Jobs Pact, the ILO has been providing crisis response support to its constituents, stepped up and publicised its crisis research and analysis. In addition, the organization has successfully drawn attention to its concerns in most important international fora.
The question we are faced with here today is: what should be the ILO's unique contribution to the recovery? Our answer is that the ILO should reinforce its role as an expert organization and deliver at its best. The broad variety of problems related to the crisis that the constituents are facing requires the ILO to be receptive to their very different needs. Whereas in some countries advocacy for a basic social protection floor and strategies to secure its funding is a primary concern, other countries have the need for very specific advice on a number of issues related to employment recovery.
With this in mind, the ILO will benefit from a two-way communication with constituents and other international organisations. When the Office is compiling overviews of crisis-related measures and their impacts, it should strive towards increased consultation with national labour ministries, statistical agencies and other specialised organisations. This would enable further precision and a higher quality of the final products, while reducing the Office’s workload.
In our view the Global Jobs Pact provides the Office and the constituents with a sufficient and powerful instrument to deal with the employment and social consequences of the crisis. The success of the three key elements of the Office’s strategy to support constituents in giving effect to the pact depends on the depth, scope and quality of the analysis produced.
With regard to technical support, we fully agree with the proposal in para. 62 of the document. In this context it is important to promote ILO's presence and mandate within the UN system and the aid coordination processes in any given country. Furthermore, skilled staff with different and complementary backgrounds are needed to ensure that the country-level support is coherent and solid. A particularly interesting proposal in this regard is the idea of skills mapping, expressed in the human resources strategy of the ILO.
The EU endorses the idea that research and analysis, knowledge sharing and capacity building should be key elements to support the constituents in their efforts to make use of the Global Jobs Pact. The analysis and research capacity of the Office is decisive for delivering concrete and useful policy advice on all levels, from local to global. To this end we expect the suggested programme for analytical research and information dissemination to serve as a stepping stone for enhanced efficiency and credibility. In this respect we also appreciate the efforts to increase access to ILO knowledge through the website.
Within the international policy dialogue the ILO needs to further position itself as the expert organization on employment and social issues, while finding ways to consolidate its analysis with those of other international organisations. The international policy dialogue aims at achieving a coherent and integrated global crisis response, taking into account the multiplicity of challenges to be addressed. The ILO needs to work on different levels and has to keep on being an advocate in the international community, especially when economic recovery seems to be in sight but the labour market is still downsizing. That means that the GJP and concrete impacts should be further explored within the upcoming multilateral conferences of the next year: First of all within the G20 Labour Ministers Meeting in Washington, the results of which should be fed into the following G20 summit; and secondly in the next ASEM labour ministers conference. The success of the international policy dialogue requires all actors to be pragmatic and forthcoming. The EU recognizes the initiatives already taken in collaboration with the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO respectively and would urge further initiatives of this kind.
In line with the above we would like to support the decision point 67 in the document. However, also the EU would like to suggest an additional point: We request the office to dedicate the next WP/SDG in March 2010 to addressing implementation measures undertaken to give effect to the Global Jobs Pact, and related issues, and thus provide an input for the forthcoming G20 labour ministers conference. And we would like to emphasize that words need to be converted into actions. To this end the EU believes that the ILO – with a reinforced analytical capacity – will be better equipped to effectively meet the constituents’ needs.
Thank you, Mr/Mme Chair.
_____________* Croatia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia continue to be part of the Stabilisation and Association Process.